File managers

15 min read

WE COMPARE TONS OF STUFF SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO!

Dolphin Krusader Midnight Commander Nemo Thunar

File managers are the interface between the user and storage, and Michael Reed looks at five of the best that Linux has to offer.

Michael Reed has written widely about Linux and open source software, and his files are always well managed.

HOW WE TESTED…

Our testing system this time was Linux Mint with the Cinnamon desktop. This detail is important because Linux applications such as file managers tend to inherit the theme and icon-set options of the underlying desktop environment.

Some of the features also rely on subsystems of the underlying distro. For example, network and archive mounting might rely on GVfs or KIO services on Gnome or KDE systems respectively.

For the archive testing, we created some example ZIP archives and downloaded some ISO images to test the systems. We made sure that we actually carried out some file management jobs to roadtest each file manager and throw up any awkward moments with each user interface or technical glitches once they were under the strain of actual work.

In the case of Midnight Commander and Krusader, we built from source to obtain the latest stable version as the versions in the Mint repository were out of date.

CREDIT: Getty Images/Brand X Pictures/Rubberball

The file manager is what sits between you and the files on your T storage devices. Many of us have a favourite, but it’s just as common to make do with whatever is installed by default by your distro. Maybe we can inspire a switcheroo to something different. We’re putting the ‘big five’ under the LXF microscope.

Dolphin is part of the KDE project and is an evolution from the earlier Konqueror web browser/file manager project. It’s easy to use, even though it’s a heavyweight in terms of the features that it offers.

Krusader comes from a similar KDE lineage, but it’s a two-pane file manager aimed squarely at tech-heads due to all the customisation and integrated tools it offers.

Thunar is the official file manager of the Xfce desktop environment, and it has a reputation for being light on resources yet offering most of the features a user is likely to need.

Midnight Commander is, like Krusader, a two-pane file manager with a lot of features, but it leaves out the GUI because it is a textmode utility.

Nemo is one of the forks of the original Gnome file manager Nautilus, and it aims to retain the feature set of older versions. So, let’s see which you should consider installing.